Andy Warhol

The present work was based on a small black-and-white advertisement that can be traced to newspapers, and belongs to a second group of paintings which Warhol made in early 1961 of everyday objects purloined from newspaper advertisements. He depicted an array of consumer goods, such as television sets, vacuum cleaners, shoes and, in the case of the present work, watches. Like Water Heater (1961, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Roy Lichtenstein, December 13^th, 1971), Watches is based on an advertisement that appeared in the Sunday Daily News on March 26, 1961. As Georg Frei, et al, note, “Warhol’s composition combines part of the ad’s general heading – including the words “Of Values” which appear in a block over the right side of a two-page spread in the newspaper – with portions of watch faces and bands from one ad. Typically … the painting addresses the printed page and its field of fragmentary but related messages rather than the object being advertised”. (Georg Frei, et al, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculpture, Volume 1: 1961-1963, New York 2002, p. 44).

This series of ‘Newspaper Advertisements’ works was previously dated 1960, however, research into Warhol’s source materials confirmed that he was looking at advertisements in newspapers printed, irregularly, between January and April 1961. Stylistically, this body of work represents the most painterly of Warhol’s works in the early 1960’s. Certain paintings from this series, most notably $199 Television (1961), formerly in the Kimiko and John Powers Collection and Icebox (1961, Houston, The Menil Collection), are very painterly, with passages of tonal painting suggesting that these objects are situated in atmospheric space rather than being reproduced from a flat advertisement. The present work acts as a bridge between this group and a later series of consumer product paintings depicting a drill, diamond ring and a ‘Rupture-Easer’. These works, like Watches, are created only in black and white, and their strong graphic emphasis prefigures the graphic sensibility of Warhol’s silkscreen technique that he would arrive at a year later.